Consumers need to organize and send purchase orders to suppliers for procurement purposes. Procurement is a process in which a buyer makes sure that a purchase order for a particular supplier is accurate and authorized. The organization and procurement of purchase orders are especially necessary for large retailers, wholesalers, manufacturers, and electronic companies who buy many different types of items from many different suppliers. Manufacturers need to replenish their parts in stock to keep up with their production schedule. Grocery retailers need to replenish their perishable items in a supermarket. Electronic companies need to buy parts for their newly designed products. Wholesalers need to purchase large quantities of goods from many different manufacturers. Furthermore, regular consumers who often shop over the Internet for discounted products from different suppliers also need to organize their purchasing records. All of these consumers can make use of a software program to organize and send purchase orders to suppliers so that billing statements are generated accurately and purchased items are received on schedule.
This procurement process is very important because it is costly for both consumers and suppliers if purchase orders are missing and get sent to the wrong consumers or if purchases are unauthorized. It takes time and money to track down missing purchase orders and correct inaccurate billing statements. Suppliers may loose customers if the procurement is not accurate. On the other hand, consumers such as grocery stores, retailers, wholesalers, and manufacturers may loose profits without accurate procurement because they have business schedules that depend upon the delivery of the purchased items. Therefore, consumers and suppliers need a software program which can help them in the organization and procurement of purchase orders.
This need is especially felt by both consumers and suppliers as the electronic commerce activities increase. In the recent years, the number of on-line consumers and suppliers has increased greatly, becoming commonplace. An on-line or an electronic consumer is a consumer who purchases items via such media as the Internet and World Wide Web (www). On-line purchasing becomes a convenient, cost effective, and timesaving method of buying. Over the Internet and via other on-line media, consumers can examine and select items that they want to purchase by interacting with web pages such as clicking and dragging items into an electronic shopping cart. The suppliers of the selected-and-purchased items then send these consumers a billing statement. On-line market is also a good method for suppliers to commercialize their products. It is economical and convenient for suppliers to post their catalogs on-line to advertise their products. Consequently, as the electronic commerce activities increase, the demand for a procurement software program also increases.
The boom of electronic commerce has brought about many software programs to assist users of procurement applications in different aspects of purchasing and procurement processes. One such aspect is the placing of orders via on-line modalities. In the placing of on-line orders, a user typically views a collection of items from a supply source on a computer monitor at a locale remote from the supply source. Typically, the ordering information is displayed to the user in a format such as a webpage, effectuated by coding in HyperText markup language (HTML). Requests from users which render webpages involved in the order process, and other related pages coded in HTML are thus necessary to enabling orders through contemporary electronic commerce media. In many cases, several, sometimes many webpages are required to display to the user, and interactively effectuate the user's provision through input, of an amount of information sufficient to complete an ordering action.
Typically, a number of screen pages related to the ordering process, sometimes many, contain information that is similar. For example, several webpages involved in the ordering process contain addresses, e.g., an interactive screen aspect displaying and effectuating input of various addresses necessary to effectuate an order transaction. Such addresses may include billing addresses, shipping addresses, sending addresses, paying addresses, and other addresses. In one exemplary format, such addresses may be formatted in a configuration such as billTo, shipTo, sendTo, payTo, etc., accompanied by interactive fields, wherein a user may input completely, or make changes to, address information. It is appreciated that other information may be similarly displayed and interacted with in screen pages effectuating on-line ordering actions.
The informational representation, e.g., display, as well as the informational inputs to the appropriate interactive fields thereon, have a number of similarities. These similarities, nevertheless, require expression through code used to generate the HTML pages. Conventionally, such similarities in screen pages typically necessitate redundancies in the code by which they are generated. Such redundancies render the conventional art problematic for a number of reasons.
Redundancy is inherently burdensome to systems, such as computer systems utilized in the implementation and operation of orders and other aspects of electronic commerce. Such burdens reduce system efficiency, speed, and appropriate capacity unavailable for other functions. In this respect it is wasteful. It delays and may deter system operations and the commerce effectuated thereby. Further, code redundancy adds complexity, expense, and propensity to error to the code used in order modules. Such burdens are realized at several levels. First, programming is encumbered by the tedium inherent in redundancy. Second, both debugging and implementation is hampered by the complexity and sheer volume of code written to be so redundant. Third, user operations are made more complicated, tedious, and difficult by having to use the redundant code to generate HTML pages needed to implement their orders.